Comparing Schubert's Winterreise And Schumann

Work of art from the Romantic time period shares many similarities with work that is seen in the modern world and today’s audience can relate greatly to art from that time. There is a strong sense of emotion and erotic response in art in the modern age and people react strongly to that. Art from romanticism brings out the same emotion and response.

Romantic 
Dates: 1800-1900
 
1.  What was going on historically during this era?  What was life like? Profound Political and Social changes going on; many moving into cities for work. Renewed interested in expressing emotion through music. 
2.  Does romantic music continue to use the same forms used in the classical era? No
3.  Explain the Individuality of style. Composers wanted their music to be uniquely identifiable to them. They worked hard on self-expression.
4.  What are the expressive aims and subjects of the pieces?  How is this different than in the classical era? Flamboyance, Intimacy, Unpredictability, Melancholy, Rapture, Longing etc..., Classical Era did not experiment with so many aims.
5.  What is musical nationalism?

Franz Peter Schubert is a composer who made his way to the top in between two time periods. He is considered one of the last classical composers and one of the first romantic composers. He is responsible for many great pieces that have become popular after his death. Schubert faced many hardships in life, yet stayed focused on his craft despite his deteriorating health. Schubert was born on January 31, 1797 in Himmelpfortgrund, Austria.

Nevertheless, what comes after the Classical Era is named the Romantic Era, and the spirit is called Romanticism, by which represents “the end of the relationship between a subject and an object. Feelings search the subject’s quality in nature, and integrates together.” It emphasizes on man as the subject and has a strong focus on emotions, rather than the God or authorities, which leads to an “attempt to transcend the sphere of cognition, to experience higher, more spiritual things, and to sense the presence of the ineffable” in Romantic Era music. The raise of program music allows the composers to explore a deeper spiritual work, as it is defined by “a preface added to a piece of instrumental music, by means of which the composer intends to guard the listener against a wrong poetical interpretation, and to direct his attention to the poetical idea of the whole or to a particular part of it.” With the development in humanism and the broader spiritual exploration, the major characteristic of Romantic Era music could be

The era of Romanticism began as a rebellious response to the Enlightenment era. Three different authors— Wilhelm Wackenroder, August Schlegel, and Percy Shelley— allude to the Romantic significance of poetry and conceptualize poetry as “the language of the people.” In their documents presented in Breckman’s European Romanticism: a Brief History with Documents, they explore poetry and the impact it has on the people and Romanticism and persuade their readers to connect with nature and art.

Schubert’s success with lied began with his masterpiece, Gretchen im Spinnrade. Written in the early romantic era, the year 1814. It is based on a text by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a poet whose works would become the most associated with the romantic music of the era due in part to Schubert’s well loved settings. It was Schubert’s first successful foray into lied. Indeed, this was his 30th vocal and piano pairing and it was in this masterpiece that he created at one stroke, the Romantic German lied. This success emboldened him and in the following year brought about the composition of more than one-hundred and forty more lied.

Many prominent musicians produced major works during the romantic period. Among these are Beethoven, Strause, and Bach. But the musician that I think had the most impact, was Franz Schubert. Franz Peter, born on 31 January 1797 was one of fourteen children born of Franz Theodore Schubert and Elisabeth Vietz, four of which survived. He grew up in an apartment that daily converted to a classroom in which his father taught several elementary school classes. He received a thorough basic education; his father being a good teacher, and son being a bright student. From his father Franz also learned to play the violin, and from his

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was not a particularly well-known composer during his lifetime, however, that did not stop him from leaving his mark on the musical world. He radically redefined the role of composers in German lieder. Unlike his predecessors, Schubert believed that part of a composer’s job was to help the listener interpret the poem. He believed that part of his responsibility was to write the melody and the accompaniment in a way that helped to clarify the meaning of the poem and bring it to life for the listener. That being said, Schubert did not completely discard the work of others before him. Instead, he built on the foundation that they had laid, reflecting the work of previous composers in his music without limiting himself to simple imitation of their ideas. He expanded on their ideas and used them as a platform to express himself in new and distinct ways that were unfamiliar to the music world. His innovations inspired those who came after him not only in German lied but also in other song genres. One particular example of his ability can be seen in both the vocal lines as well as the accompaniment in his song cycle, Die Schöne Müllerin.

M. H. Abrams defines romantic themes in prominent writers of this school in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as being five in number: (1) innovations in the materials, forms and style; (2) that the work involve a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”; (3) that external nature be a persistent subject with a “sensuous nuance” and accuracy in its description; (4) that the reader be invited to identify the protagonist with the author himself; and (5) that this be an age of “new beginnings and high possibilities” for the person (177-79).

One of the most characteristic features of Romanticism is the concoction of artistic genres, a fusion that carries the latent desire for the unity of arts through the prism of music and whose culmination can be found in the works of Richard Wagner. The two juxtapositions in Romantic music, the grandiose display of sounds while preserving intimacy and sentimental confession, and the image of a man against nature while idealizing it at the same time, effectuate their conciliation in the Lied. Romanticism seeks sensibility, insight, and transcendence in poems by adding a musical setting to them. As Susan Youens put it: "Lieder begin with words; they are born when a composer encounters poetry", therefore it is an on-going duet between poetry and music

It was Franz Peter Schubert, who said to a friend “I have come into the world for no other purpose but to compose”. For someone to be so certain, focused and dedicated at such a young age with extraordinary talent and promise, finding out more about Schubert’s life and astonishing music was a must for me.

Even though Franz Schubert's most admire composer, Ludwig van Beethoven composed his sacred music in his late period, Schubert began to compose his sacred music since his early age. Throughout Schubert’s short life, he composed six masses. His six masses can be divided between early four masses and late two masses. Schubert’s last mass in E flat includes unique moments where chorus sings unmelodic and homophonic passages with melodic phrases in one or more of the instruments. This short paper examines why Schubert chooses the moments he does to have the choir sing simple chords while the instruments wax rhapsodic.

Franz Schubert, a Viennese composer who was born in 1797, is considered the last of the Classical composers and one of the first in the Romantic Period. Composed in 1827, Franz Schubert's Impromptus are a series of eight pieces for solo piano. They were published in two sets of four impromptus each and Op. 90 was the first to be published in his lifetime. Impromptu is a style of music roughly beginning in the Romantic Period written for a solo instrument, typically the piano, that is improvisational in sound. Schubert uses a wide range of emotion, atmosphere, sonority and structure. As it is a piece of music in the Romantic era, it offers a wide range of dynamics, building up crescendos and diminuendos which shows the rich emotions throughout

Développement de l’amour: The movement’s belated development of the recurring statue, flower, and love themes is as fractured as it is dense. Messiaen brings in a new fourth theme. Joy and threatening darkness are bound

The theme I chose is love, and I chose the early 1900s as a time period to focus on. I believe that this is a topic worth exploring in humanities because everybody can relate to it, and people tend to create impactful art, music, etc., in the name of love. Love can have a huge impact and play an essential and influential role in a person’s life. The reason why I chose this specific time period is because I believe that it was a great time of romanticism. It was the beginning of a time where people took different approaches to showcase their thoughts and feelings, especially through art and music. The time period was also more modern, so many of the works involving love are relatable to people today.